In 2008, the Bitcoin whitepaper opened with a simple description: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not a store of value. Not digital gold. Cash — money that moves directly between people, without a bank in the middle. It was the founding idea of the entire network.
For most of the years since, that idea has stayed just out of reach. Bitcoin became something people held and watched rather than something they spent. Every attempt to make it usable at the till asked for a trade-off: open a Lightning channel, hand your coins to a custodian, or convert to fiat the moment a payment cleared. Each fix solved one problem by giving up something that mattered more. So Bitcoin stayed in the vault, and “electronic cash” stayed a line in a PDF.
Today, that changes. The GoBTC Pay Gen1 SDK and API are live. The scripture said cash. Today the prophecy is fulfilled.
“Satoshi didn't create Bitcoin to sit idle in wallets. It was designed to move value between people,” said Mark Zalan, CEO of GoMining. “With the launch of the GoBTC Pay SDK and API, we're giving merchants and wallet providers the infrastructure to bring that vision into real-world commerce in a way that is seamless and intuitive for users. We believe Bitcoin's next chapter will be defined by how people use it, in addition to how many people own it.”
GoBTC Pay is GoMining's layer-1 Bitcoin payment protocol, built for instant, non-custodial transactions. The Gen1 release turns it from a closed demo into open infrastructure: merchant onboarding tools, payment management, a web-based merchant dashboard, online payment integrations, public developer documentation, and an open API for wallet providers and institutional partners. As part of the gradual rollout, an initial group of up to 10 merchants and ecosystem partners will begin integrating GoBTC Pay into their products and services with thousands on the waiting list.
It settles directly on Bitcoin while preserving user ownership and non-custody — no second layers, no wrapped tokens, no forced conversion to fiat. What makes that possible is something no payment company has had: GoMining mines the blocks. GoBTC Pay is powered by GoMining's private mempool built on the Stratum V2 protocol, which prioritises GoBTC Pay transactions and targets an average settlement window of around 12 hours. Users keep control of their BTC, transactions settle directly on Bitcoin, and merchants get instant payment confirmation with on-chain settlement in 12 hours .
The economics are built to align everyone involved. Merchants pay a 0.2% transaction fee — a fraction of what card networks charge — and that fee is split evenly between the wallet providers and the miners in the GoMining pool that process the settlement. Rather than sitting on a balance sheet, it flows back to the infrastructure participants who make each transaction happen, rewarding the people who run the network and encouraging real-world Bitcoin payment activity.
This release is the foundation. From here, merchants and wallets integrate, and the places you can pay in Bitcoin grow over time. Following GoBTC Pay's introduction at Consensus Miami, it marks the start of a broader ecosystem strategy focused on merchant, wallet and partner adoption — an open protocol any wallet or merchant can build on, designed to keep expanding until paying in Bitcoin is simply normal.
Bitcoin was always meant to move. Now it does.
Pay in Bitcoin. Stay in Bitcoin. Blessed be the block.
